Free Online Course About Food
Posted by tinako on June 11, 2010
Kelly D. Brownell, PhD
I found something really neat. The April 18th, 2010 NY Times had an insert Education Life which is all about free online courses you can take. These are mostly videotapings of college lectures. One of the featured courses was a Yale psychology course, Psych 123: The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food. Here is the NY Times article “Why we go Cuckoo for….“
Professor Kelly Brownell is the author of Food Fight, and it is required reading for the class.
I watched the first lecture and found it fun and interesting. For instance, he asks the students to define “food,” and there are several answers. Then he puts up a slide showing a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos and a cockroach. He goes down the definitions of food and the cockroach outscores the Cheetos until they get to the definitions regarding culture, what everyone else eats. He shows several fast food commercials and the students are asked what messages are being sent by the ads.
You can watch the course at this link.
Geek note: I watched the first lecture using the link under Class Sessions and I had a terrible time with my player’s caching. Then I found that you can pre-download the lecture under Downloads; I did that and I’m hoping that will be the end of that problem.
I’m going to blog about the lectures and the assignments, but if you are following along, you might find this posting of the readings helpful.
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